She looked for them in the room, for it hurt her to see the little feet bare that used to be so warm and pink, and were now so cold and white; but during her absence the rats had found the shoes under the bed, and for want of better food had nibbled them, gnawed at them, and cut holes in the leather.
It was a great grief to the poor mother that Hans should go away into the other world with bare feet; when the heart is all one wound, it only needs a touch to make it bleed.
She cried to see the slippers: from that inflamed, worn-out eye a tear could still gush.
How could she get shoes for Hans, when she had already given her ring and her house? That was the thought that troubled her. By dint of thinking she had an idea.
In the bread-bin there was still a whole loaf of bread, as, for a long time, the unhappy woman, kept alive by her sorrow, had been eating nothing.
She broke the loaf, remembering that, in the past, she had often made with the soft parts pigeons, geese, chickens, wooden shoes, boats, and other boys’ things to amuse Hans.
Placing the bread in the hollow of her hand, and kneading it with her thumb while she moistened it with her tears, she made a little pair of bread shoes, with which she covered the cold, bluish feet of the dead child, and, her heart consoled, she turned down the shroud and closed the coffin.—While she was kneading the bread, a poor man had come to the door and timidly asked for some bread; but she had signed to him with her hand to go away.
The grave-digger came to take away the box, and buried it in a corner of the cemetery under a clump of white rose-bushes: the air was warm, it was not raining and the ground was not wet; this was a comfort to the mother, who thought that her poor little Hans would not pass the first night in his tomb too uncomfortably.
When she returned home to her solitary house, she placed Hans’s cradle beside her bed, lay down and fell asleep.
Overtaxed nature succumbed.